Senior Software Developer - Confluent DevProd

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Our team sits within the Developer Productivity (DevProd) organization and is responsible for ensuring that Confluent engineers can safely and efficiently build, test, and operate our cloud at scale. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate internal platform services and tools that improve developer experience and overall engineering velocity. You’ll take ownership of meaningful projects—often with some ambiguity—partnering with senior engineers and stakeholders to shape solutions, implement them, and support them in production and critical pre-prod environments. This role is ideal for someone who: Enjoys platform services work: multi-tenant, internal-facing services used by hundreds of engineers. Cares deeply about testability, reliability, and developer experience in complex, distributed systems. Thrives in R&D-leaning, somewhat ambiguous spaces where you prototype, iterate, and converge on the right solution. Is curious about practical AI-assisted developer workflows and comfortable learning and evaluating new tools. Is highly self-driven, naturally takes initiative, and does things that are important without being asked. What You Will Do: Build and operate internal developer platform services — design secure, multi-tenant, and scalable services that integrate into existing DevProd systems (e.g., CI/CD, test infrastructure, developer portals), and own their reliability, performance, and monitoring. Improve pre-production and performance testing capabilities — model realistic workloads and stress scenarios, automate performance/scale/regression tests as part of CI/CD, and provide actionable, self-service reporting that helps teams quickly see where their services break or degrade. Explore and integrate AI-assisted workflows for developers — evaluate AI tools and frameworks, run data-driven experiments, and, where they add real value, productionize workflows such as triage assistants, anomaly detection over pre-prod metrics, or intelligent test selection, with appropriate guardrails and visibility. Deliver projects end to end in a collaborative way — frame problems, write clear design docs, break work into milestones, drive implementation with your peers, and participate in rollout plans that include documentation, training, and feedback loops with partner teams. Contribute to team and engineering culture — participate in on-call and incident response for the components you own, write clear documentation, mentor junior engineers through design and code reviews, and help evolve best practices for DevProd and platform engineering. Education & Experience – BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience), and at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating cloud services, platforms, or large-scale distributed systems. Technical & Platform Depth – Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and reliability; proficiency in at least one statically typed language (e.g., Java, Go) plus a scripting language (e.g., Python); experience with DevProd/DevOps tooling such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure-as-code. Execution & Ownership – Demonstrated ability to independently drive projects from design through rollout, breaking work into milestones, managing risk, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time. Collaboration & Leadership – Strong written and verbal communication skills; experience mentoring other engineers, leading design and code reviews, and influencing cross-functional stakeholders in a platform setting. Operational Excellence – Proven track record owning services in production or critical pre-prod environments, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems, with a strong bias towards automation to reduce toil and improve reliability. AI Awareness – Practical experience or strong interest in integrating AI/ML or LLM-based capabilities into developer or platform workflows, along with an understanding of how to design sensible guardrails and instrumentation for safe use. You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re comfortable evaluating and adopting new tools. Hands-on experience building or integrating AI-powered developer tools (e.g., code assistants, triage copilots, anomaly detection over logs/metrics, intelligent test selection) in production environments. Deep experience with performance testing and benchmarking frameworks for distributed systems or multi-tenant cloud services, including workload modeling and automated quality gates. Chez IBM Software, nous transformons les défis des clients en solutions. Construire les produits natifs du cloud propulsés par l’IA et les plus avancés au monde, qui façonnent l’avenir des affaires et de la société. Notre héritage d’innovation crée des occasions infinies pour les employés d’IBM d’apprendre, de grandir et d’avoir un impact sur un À l’échelle mondiale. Travailler en logiciel, c’est rejoindre une équipe animée par la curiosité et la collaboration. Vous travaillerez avec diverses technologies, partenaires et industries pour concevoir, développer et livrer des solutions qui alimentent la transformation numérique. Avec une culture qui valorise l’innovation, la croissance et la continuité Learning, IBM Software vous place au cœur du paysage produit et technologique d’IBM. Ici, vous aurez les outils et les opportunités pour faire avancer votre carrière tout en créant des logiciels qui changent le monde. Avec Confluent, les données ne restent pas immobiles. Nous mettons l’information en mouvement, en diffusant presque en temps réel afin que les organisations puissent réagir plus rapidement, construire de façon plus intelligente et offrir des expériences aussi dynamiques que le monde qui les entoure. Notre équipe fait partie de l’organisation Developer Productivity (DevProd) et est responsable de s’assurer que les ingénieurs de Confluent peuvent construire, tester et exploiter notre nuage à grande échelle de façon sécuritaire et efficace. En tant qu’ingénieur logiciel principal, vous concevez, construirez et exploiterez des services et outils internes de plateforme qui amélioreront l’expérience des développeurs et la vitesse globale d’ingénierie. Vous prendrez en main des projets significatifs — souvent avec une certaine ambiguïté — en collaborant avec des ingénieurs chevronnés et des parties prenantes pour façonner des solutions, les mettre en œuvre et les soutenir dans la production et les environnements critiques de pré-production. Ce rôle est idéal pour quelqu’un qui : Apprécie le travail de services de plateforme : des services multi-locataires, orientés vers l’interne, utilisés par des centaines d’ingénieurs. Il accorde une grande importance à la testabilité, à la fiabilité et à l’expérience des développeurs dans des systèmes complexes et distribués. Prospère dans des espaces axés sur la R&D, quelque peu ambigus, où l’on fait des prototypes, l’itération et la convergence vers la bonne solution. Il est curieux des flux de travail pratiques pour développeurs assistés par l’IA et à l’aise d’apprendre et d’évaluer de nouveaux outils. Il est très autonome, prend naturellement l’initiative et fait les choses importantes sans